Formant

A formant is a distinguishing or meaningful frequency component of linguistic utterance. Without explanation (as if one were even possible at this time) we state that the information which humans require to distinguish between vowels has a purely quantitative representation in the frequency decomposition of the vowel sounds. Formants are the characteristic harmonics that tell a listener what vowels she hears. Most of these formants are produced by tube and chamber resonance, but a few whistle tones derive from periodic collapse of Venturi effect low pressure zones.